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Converting PMF to AVI Video -lossless

well, lately i was struggling a lot to find out a working solution for converting or at least being able to watch the pmf video file format from psp on my laptop. but it turn out to be a big hassle and after searching for many hours i just found one solution that didn’t work for my file.

Okay now what’s the deal with pmf!
pmf is a psp video file format that being used in many games for psp. so many games cut scene and movies are actually stored on the UMD with pmf format and all the game is doing is calling the psp AVC(H264) module to play it. so in case you copy one of those pmf file from your psp UMD to pc then you need a method to convert it to a proper format to be able to watch it.

here is what you need to convert pmf to avi:
–MPlayer 1.0rc2 get it directly from http://www.mplayerhq.hu or this link
–MeGUI get it from here
to play the avi output you need(i assume you know how to get em^^):
–ffdshow
–Media player classic

okay ready, here are the steps:
1. put the pmf file in the same folder as MPlayer and dump the video out of pmf, by running this command:
->MPlayer yourfile.pmf -dumpvideo

replace “yourfile.pmf” with the name of the file you got. when finished you’ll get a file called “yourfile.dump”

okay so what we did in this step is to extract the video stream out that we know in most cases the subtitle is also exists together with video stream in the same pmf file so we need to extract that video stream first.

2. rename “yourfile.dump” to “yourfile.264”

this is assuming that the video stream is a RAW h264 coded so in this step you just rename it. you still not able to play it since it is a raw file so you need to put it in a MP4/AVI container.

3. open MeGUI and make sure it is fully updated. go to this menu: Tools->Muxer->AVC2AVI
this will open a new window and now you can click on video browse button and choose “yourfile.264” as the video stream, if you have the audio or subtitle as well you can add them at this step. click queue.

4. now go to Queue Tab in MeGUI original window, you should see the new job created here so press Start to complete the mux and get your AVI file, this process does not include any re-encoding therefore it is lossless and won’t reduce quality in any way.

5. when finished you can watch your AVI file with any player but just make sure you let ffdshow handle the h264 codec otherwise you may not see the right result.

here is the proof of this method: FFVII-CC
this is one of the cut scene from Final Fantasy 7 – Crisis Core game on psp. i managed to unpack the package file and get to the pmf files from the US version of the game. but this was as far as i go, as for the audio i still couldn’t come up with any solution to convert atrac3 audio (.at3) to another stream.so please if anyone know a method to convert .at3 audio files to any playable format on pc let me know here.